HistoricalChristian.Faith
HistoricalChristian.Faith
Matthias is the one apostle added to the Twelve after the Ascension — and the only one whose calling the New Testament describes in full: between the Ascension and Pentecost, Peter proposed that the empty place of the fallen Judas be filled by a man who had “companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us,” from the baptism of John to the day of the Ascension; two were put forward, Joseph Barsabbas Justus and Matthias, the company prayed, cast lots, “and the lot fell upon Matthias.” After that verse the New Testament never mentions him again. Everything else — where he preached, how he died, even whether he was some better-known figure under another name — is later tradition, and the traditions are thin and divided: an ascetic Traditions of Matthias quoted (and disapproved) by Clement of Alexandria and a “Gospel of Matthias” that Eusebius files among the heretics’ forgeries; a note that ranks him among the Seventy; a lurid apocryphal romance that sends him to a city of cannibals and cannot even keep his name straight from Matthew’s; and the late apostle-lists that carry him to “Ethiopia” (that is, Colchis on the Black Sea) and give him three or four incompatible deaths — stoned and beheaded at Jerusalem, crucified, or dead of old age. His relics are claimed at Trier, the only apostolic tomb north of the Alps, and at a fortress in Georgia. This page is less a life of Matthias than a history of what was remembered and claimed about him, set out earliest source first: the full Gospel notice of his election, the second-century writings that borrowed his name, Eusebius’s two notices, the cannibal-city romance, the late lists and the medieval relic-cult, and the modern scholarship that weighs the little there is. This is a biographical tradition-timeline: its “witnesses” are the datable sources that report on him, and the contested questions — was Peter right to fill the place at all, and was Paul the “true” twelfth? was Matthias really Zacchaeus or Barnabas under another name? — are weighed on their own argument pages below rather than settled by assertion. For the shared ladder of sources and how far to trust each rung, see the apostles hub.
Related doctrines: The apostles — see also the apostles (overview) · Simon Peter · Andrew · James, son of Zebedee · John, son of Zebedee · Philip · Bartholomew · Thomas · Matthew · James, son of Alphaeus · Thaddaeus / Jude · Simon the Zealot · Judas Iscariot · Paul
Matthias enters the New Testament at a single scene and leaves it at the same one. In the days between the Ascension and Pentecost, Peter stood among some hundred and twenty believers and proposed that the “office” (episkopē) vacated by Judas be filled; the replacement had to be an eyewitness of the whole of Jesus’ public life — “of these men which have companied with us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John, unto that same day that he was taken up from us” — and a witness of the resurrection. Two men met the test: Joseph called Barsabbas Justus, and Matthias. The company prayed to the Lord “which knowest the hearts of all men” to show which he had chosen, “and they gave forth their lots; and the lot fell upon Matthias; and he was numbered with the eleven apostles.” He is never named again in the New Testament — but neither are most of the Twelve, and Paul’s own creed that the risen Christ was seen “of the twelve” already counts the restored number Matthias completed.1
The first writer after the New Testament to say anything of Matthias uses his name for a book. Clement of Alexandria three times quotes a Traditions of Matthias (Paradōseis Matthiou) — “Wonder at what is before you,” the saying runs, “laying this down first as the foundation of further knowledge” — and reports that “Matthias also taught that we ought to fight against and abuse the flesh, and not give way to it for the sake of pleasure.” Clement cites the work respectfully but does not treat it as Scripture, and the sect of the Basilidians who leaned on it he counts among the heretics. In the same Stromateis Clement preserves a second, stranger notice: retelling the story of the repentant tax-collector, he writes “Zacchaeus — or, as some say, Matthias” — the seed of a later tradition that the apostle chosen by lot was the very publican of Jericho under another name. The identification, and the manuscript tangle of “Matthias” against “Matthew” behind it, is weighed below. What is solid here is only that by about 200 Matthias’s name was attached to a body of ascetic sayings, genuine or not.2
Eusebius gives Matthias two brief notices, and they pull in opposite directions. In Book 1 of the Ecclesiastical History he passes on the tradition — which he is the first to record — that Matthias, “who was numbered with the apostles in the place of Judas,” and Barsabbas Justus with him, had first been among the Seventy whom Jesus sent out ahead of him: a tidy way of satisfying Peter’s requirement that the man have followed Jesus from the beginning. In Book 3, cataloguing the books the church rejected, he lists a “Gospel of Matthias” among the forgeries “cited by the heretics under the name of the apostles” — with the Gospels of Peter and Thomas — works “to be cast aside as absurd and impious.” So by Eusebius’s day Matthias’s name carried both an honourable early memory and a discredited apocryphal literature.3
Where the sober record stops, romance takes over. The Acts of Andrew and Matthias — among the Anthropophagi, “the man-eaters” — opens with the apostles casting lots for their mission-fields; the lot sends Matthias to a city of cannibals who blind, drug, and fatten their captives to eat them on the thirtieth day. Matthias is imprisoned and his eyes put out; Christ sends Andrew across the sea to rescue him, and after a run of miracles the city is converted. It is heroic legend of no biographical worth — and it does not even hold his name steady: many manuscripts and the Anglo-Saxon Andreas built on it call the hero “Matthew,” the better-known evangelist, so that the very text meant to celebrate Matthias keeps dissolving him into someone else. The confusion is itself the lesson: outside the one Gospel verse, the tradition could not reliably tell which apostle it was talking about.4
The late catalogues supply the mission and the death the earlier sources withhold, and cannot agree on either. The apostle-lists — the Synopsis ascribed to Dorotheus, Nicephorus, and their kin — send Matthias to preach “in Ethiopia,” meaning not Africa but Colchis on the eastern Black Sea (the harbour of Hyssus, the mouth of the Phasis), among “barbarians and man-eaters,” and bury him at Sebastopolis by the Temple of the Sun. On his death the traditions splinter: stoned by the Jews at Jerusalem and then beheaded with an axe (whence the axe in his images); crucified in Colchis; or, in Pseudo-Hippolytus, dead of old age at Jerusalem. The medieval West, following the Golden Legend, kept the stoned-and-beheaded story and the axe, and located his relics at Trier — brought there, it was said, by the empress Helena — where the abbey of St. Matthias still shows the only claimed apostolic tomb north of the Alps, while a rival tradition keeps his grave at the Gonio fortress in Georgia. These are church memory and relic-cult, not history, and the Bollandists already doubted whether the Roman relics were the apostle’s at all rather than a later Matthias, bishop of Jerusalem.5
Critical study leaves Matthias almost exactly where the one Gospel verse found him. The Traditions and the Gospel of Matthias are judged second-century pseudepigrapha that merely borrowed a safely obscure apostolic name; the Acts of Andrew and Matthias is romance, and its wandering between “Matthias” and “Matthew” a textbook case of hagiographic name-drift; the mission to Colchis and the several deaths are late, mutually exclusive, and unattested before the list-literature, so that surveys of the apostles’ fates rank the evidence for any particular end of Matthias among the very weakest. What can be said with confidence is only this: after Judas fell, the Eleven filled the Twelve by lot with a man named Matthias who had been a disciple from the beginning and a witness of the resurrection — and the two live questions the sources raise (whether the election itself was legitimate, and whether “Matthias” was a second name for someone we already know) are matters of argument, weighed below.6
A recurring argument holds that Peter acted in the flesh in Acts 1 — jumping ahead of the Spirit he had just been told to wait for, and choosing by lot a man God never intended — so that the real twelfth apostle was Paul, later “called by the will of God,” and Matthias a human mistake God quietly corrected. The reading is coherent and has real proponents, but the case against it is strong on every axis: the text shows no hint of censure, casting lots to learn a choice already God’s was standard biblical practice, all present (Matthias included) were filled with the Spirit at Pentecost, Paul plainly failed Peter’s stated qualification (a companion “from the baptism of John”), and Paul himself counts “the twelve” as intact and never claims Judas’s seat. It does not hold on its best case. Weak.7
A cluster of identifications would give the featureless Matthias a fuller biography by fusing him with someone better known: with Zacchaeus the tax-collector of Jericho (on a reading of one line in Clement of Alexandria), or with Barnabas (on the surface overlap of the name Joseph Barsabbas). Both fail. The Zacchaeus equation rests on a textual variant — Clement wrote “Zacchaeus, or as some say, Matthias,” where other witnesses read “Matthew” — and even taken at face value reports only what “some” said; the Barnabas equation confuses Matthias with his rejected rival Joseph Barsabbas (himself only perhaps Barnabas) and collapses two men Acts carefully distinguishes. Neither has early or independent support. Weak.8
The election of Matthias: Acts 1:15–26 — Peter’s proposal (vv. 15–22), the requirement of a witness “beginning from the baptism of John, unto that same day that he was taken up from us” (vv. 21–22), the two candidates “Joseph called Barsabas, who was surnamed Justus, and Matthias” (v. 23), the prayer and the lot: “and the lot fell upon Matthias; and he was numbered with the eleven apostles” (v. 26). The risen Christ seen “of the twelve”: 1 Corinthians 15:5. Fuller treatment on the New Testament detail page. ↩
Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215) quotes the Traditions of Matthias: “Wonder at what is before you” (Stromateis 2.9, where the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation renders the name “Matthew”); the ascetic teaching “that we ought to fight against and abuse the flesh, and not give way to it for the sake of pleasure” (Stromateis 3.4). The Zacchaeus/Matthias notice: Stromateis 4.6 (“Zaccheus, or, according to some, Matthew, the chief of the publicans” in ANF; the Greek reads Matthian, “Matthias”). Fuller treatment on the Clement detail page. ↩
Matthias among the Seventy: Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 1.12.3 (“Matthias, also, who was numbered with the apostles in the place of Judas, and the one who was honored by being made a candidate with him, are likewise said to have been deemed worthy of the same calling with the seventy”). The Gospel of Matthias among the heretics’ forgeries: Ecclesiastical History 3.25.6. Fuller treatment on the Eusebius detail page. ↩
The Acts of Andrew and Matthias (apud Anthropophagos), tr. Alexander Walker, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 8; the cannibal city (unnamed in the Greek, “Myrmidonia” in the Latin), the blinding and drugging of captives, and Andrew’s rescue of Matthias. On the “Matthew”-for-“Matthias” confusion in the title and manuscripts (and the Anglo-Saxon Andreas), see the standard reference article and the detail page. On the apocryphal Acts as low-value romance / early witness to veneration, see the apostles hub. ↩
The mission to “Ethiopia”/Colchis and death at Sebastopolis: the Synopsis ascribed to Dorotheus of Tyre and to Nicephorus, surveyed in Catholic Encyclopedia, “St. Matthias” (“he preached the Gospel to barbarians and cannibals in the interior of Ethiopia… He died at Sebastopolis, and was buried there, near the Temple of the Sun”) and Wikipedia, “Matthias the Apostle”. The stoned-and-beheaded death and the axe emblem, and the Trier relics via Helena (with the Bollandists’ doubt that the Roman relics are the apostle’s rather than Matthias bishop of Jerusalem): same Catholic Encyclopedia article. Pseudo-Hippolytus (death of old age at Jerusalem): On the Twelve Apostles. On the apostle-lists and the Golden Legend as church memory / late legend, see the apostles hub; fuller treatment on the detail page. ↩
On the second-century pseudepigrapha bearing Matthias’s name, and the general obscurity of the figure, see the collected Traditions of Matthias fragments and W. Schneemelcher, New Testament Apocrypha (rev. ed., Westminster John Knox, 1991–92). On grading the martyrdom-traditions, Sean McDowell, The Fate of the Apostles (Routledge, 2015), which places the evidence for Matthias’s death among the weakest of the apostles. ↩
See the argument page, Was Matthias’s election legitimate, or was Paul the “true” twelfth apostle? — assessment weak. ↩
See the argument page, Was Matthias the same man as Zacchaeus, or as Barnabas? — assessment weak. ↩